The Mute Stones Speak: The Story of Archaeology in Italy

(inside front and back covers)
THE STORY OF ARCHAEOLOGY IN ITALY
PAUL MacKENDRICK
ST MARTIN’S PRESS · NEW YORK
Copyright © 1960 by Paul MacKendrick All rights reserved Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 60-8767 Manufactured in the United States of America By H. Wolff, New York
TO MY WIFE
This book owes much to many: to the Trustees of the American Academy in Rome, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Research Committee of the University of Wisconsin Graduate School, for giving me the opportunity to spend three years in Italy; to Laurance and Isabel Roberts, for hospitality and moral support; to Axel Boëthius, for friendship and instruction; to Ernest Nash, for photographs and advice; to Mrs. Inez Longobardi, the best and most helpful of librarians and friends; to Ferdinando Castagnoli, for sharing with me his incomparable knowledge of the topography of Rome and Latium; to R. I. W. Westgate and Alston Chase, who taught me Latin at Harvard and have been my friends for thirty years; to the staff of the St. Martin’s Press: Diane Wheeler-Nicholson, and Fred J. Royar, for giving the book so handsome a dress; especially to my colleague J. P. Heironimus, for meticulous proofreading which saved me from much error; and to Frank E. Brown, who introduced me to archaeology and is hereby absolved from responsibility for all untoward results of the introduction. My overarching debt is acknowledged in the dedication.
In May of 1945 two young British Army officers, John Bradford and Peter Williams-Hunt, based with the R.A.F. at Foggia in the province of Puglia, near the heel of Italy, found that the World War II armistice left them with time on their hands. Both trained archaeologists, they readily prevailed upon the R.A.F. to combine routine training flights with pushing back the frontiers of science. The result of their air reconnaissance was to change profoundly the archaeological map of Italy.
The value of air-photography for archaeology had long been known; as early as 1909 pictures taken from a balloon had revealed the plan of Ostia, the port of ancient Rome. But the English, especially such pioneers as Major G. W. G. Allen and O. G. S. Crawford, early took the lead in interpreting, on photographs taken usually for military purposes, vegetation-marks showing the presence and plan of ancient sites buried beneath the soil, and invisible to the groundling’s eye. Where the subsoil has been disturbed in antiquity by the digging of a ditch, the increased depth of soil will produce more luxuriant crops or weeds; where soil-depth is decreased by the presence of ancient foundations, walls, floors, or roads, the crop will be thin, stunted, lighter in color. Air-photographs taken in raking light, just after sunrise or just before sunset in a dry season, especially over grassland, will highlight these buried landscapes. The Tavoliere, the great prairie where Foggia lies, thirty by fifty-five miles in extent, suits these conditions admirably; its mean annual rainfall is only 18.6 inches (0.6 in July) or half that of Rome, and Rome is a dry place, at least in summer. So Bradford and Williams-Hunt had high hopes for their project.